


Second Chapter

by Arsenic



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 21:20:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5513696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/pseuds/Arsenic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a few scenes about Eliza getting to where she's ready to begin organizing the orphanage, and the way Angelica may have played a part in that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Chapter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lomedet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomedet/gifts).



> I have not read the Chernow biography, any facts that are in this fic that don't directly come from the musical's interpretation of events are from quick and dirty internet research and are only there because they were somehow necessary to the series of events.

Angelica is the one who washes Alexander's blood from Eliza's hands. His body has chilled beneath her touch, not cold, but not the flaming heat of the pain and infection of his last moments. Angelica draws her away, calls her dear heart, scrubs gently and thoroughly at her hands until every trace of him is gone. Eliza thinks she should protest, but she hasn't the words. Words have always been Angelica's thing. Alexander's.

Angelica throws away the dress Eliza is wearing. Eliza senses she should try and restore it. Money is already tight, and bound to be moreso with Alexander gone, her eldest son dead, her eldest daughter mad, and her third and fourth eldest children still deep in their studies. She knows she will never be able to wear the dress again, though, so the effort seems wasted.

Her sister stays, sleeping in bed aside Eliza as they did when they were children and Eliza was afraid of the dark. Eliza can't remember a time when Angelica seemed afraid of anything. She finds herself asking, "Does anything scare you?"

Angelica is silent for so long, Eliza does not expect her to answer. In the end, though, she says, "The thought of not seeing your smile again."

*

Eliza makes lists. Rarely on paper, although occasionally if there's something she's truly concerned she'll forget she'll do so. But mostly, her lists are in her head, lists of things she must get done before she too takes to her bed and does not get out. She is a woman, and will not go out in a blaze of smoke and pistol fire like her husband, her son. Not for the first time, she wishes men were just a bit more like women.

She starts with Alexander's papers, reams and reams of them. She reads and sorts and figures out a system in the time when she's not still raising or acting as confidant to the six children still with her in body and mind.

Time passes with a type of convenient quickness so long as she does not stop and think for too long. So she doesn't.

*

Isabella Graham asks Eliza, "How do you do it?"

Eliza, who's been contemplating how best to channel little James's burning need to help her with the project of maintaining his father's legacy. Perhaps he's not so little anymore. She pushes aside the thought. "Hm? Do what?"

"Handle six children on your own."

Isabella has recently taken in six children, orphans all. Eliza and Alexander had of course taken in Fanny Antil, but Eliza imagines it was different. Fanny was the child of Alexander's friend, these six are simply children with no one. "Well, the eldest do help a bit with the youngest, a benefit you haven't got."

Isabella messes with the fabric of her skirt, looking wan. "I can't turn them over the almshouse. It's no solution."

Even the thought turns Eliza's stomach. Alexander, for all his words, for all the times when he shared all the wrong things, too many things, had never much spoken of the time period between his mother's death and his arrival in New York. She knows certain details, the names of prominent persons, of those who showed him kindness. And she knows that he felt tossed about, afraid, and alone. The latter she knows only because of the way he would wake from his sleep at times and make small admissions, quiet in the dark; because she was his wife, and she knew him.

Had he been turned over to an almshouse, would his brilliant mind have dried up, crushed under the weight of starvation and back-breaking, monotonous work? She does not know the answer. She finds herself saying, "There must be an alternative solution." 

Isabella looks over at her. She seems to be hesitating as to whether to say something. Eliza waits and Isabella admits, "Johanna Bethune has been urging me to read about the orphanage in Charleston, the one created a little over a decade ago. It seems like a worthwhile model."

Eliza knows very little about orphanages, but if Isabella and Johanna think they might have promise at creating a place for some of these displaced children, many of them younger than Alexander when he lost his mother, then she is certainly eager to learn. "Tell me."

*

Angelica comes to visit toward the end of the bitter winter, the season still holding the city in its grip. They hole up in the parlor, watching as Elizabeth, William and little Phillip play. Eliza says, "There's something I've not written about. Something I wanted to say to you in person."

Angelica looks interested, but unconcerned. "You've my attention."

"I've been working with some friends, an Isabella Graham and Johanna Bethune, to start an orphanage."

Angelica watches Eliza the way she has since they were children, as if Eliza's face will tell her more details than Eliza's words ever could. She asks, "Like the ones in Georgia and Charleston?"

"We have been looking at those models, although we've plenty of ideas of our own. It must be somewhere that I would be willing to allow my own children to be raised, somewhere with guidance and education and, most of all, kindness."

Angelica smiles. "I know you like I know my own mind, sister mine. There will never be anyone as trusting or as kind. If you intend there to be kindness, there shall be."

Eliza has always believed Angelica merely incapable of seeing her own kindness. It is unspoken between them, the things that Angelica has sacrificed for others, for her. But while Eliza may be trusting, she's neither blind nor stupid, and she knows her sister as well. She covers Angelica's hand with her own and says, "Be that as it may, your input is ever desired."

*

Angelica stands with Eliza, Isabella, and Johanna in the parlor of the small frame house on Bank Street in Greenwich Village which has become the Orphan Asylum Society of New York on the day it opens. The day when sixteen ragged, starving, chilled children are given space, and nearly two hundred more have to be turned away.

The four women, along with a small hired staff of house mothers, clean the children and see that they are fed. They teach them the rules of the house and their duties. They tuck each child in bed and kiss each forehead. A few lullabies are sung.

When Angelica and Eliza arrive back at Eliza's home, bustling with the children who still live there, warm and alive and joyous, Eliza finds herself unable to hold back her tears for all the children they were not able to save, who will be stealing dinner tonight if there is to be any dinner at all, sleeping in cold alleys if they are to sleep. Angelica, understanding her immediately, wraps her in a hug and says, "It is only a beginning, dearest. Even G-d didn't create the world in one day."

Eliza laughs through her sniffles, as she is meant to. She asks lightly, "Why is it that you must always be right?"

"The burden of being the eldest sister," Angelica responds with an air of exasperation.

Eliza closes her eyes, rests her cheek against Angelica's shoulder, and smiles. "You bear it well."

**Author's Note:**

> Dear treatee, I realize you asked for something that passes the Bechdel Test between these two characters, and I know this might be skirting the edges of that, since Alexander's ghost is at least somewhat present in all of this, but given the narrative focus of the musical I feel like it's almost impossible for some element of him not to be there if writing about the events during or after the musical. So, I hope this was close enough, or that you at least enjoy anyway, if it is not.


End file.
